A peer-to-peer (P2P) car sharing model enables vehicle owners to rent their vehicles to others for short periods of time. Participating vehicle owners typically charge a fee to rent out their vehicles, and participating renters drive the vehicles and pay for the time they need to use them. The participating owners and renters may use a common vehicle-sharing platform, which may be in the form of a website or mobile application, to manage the scheduling of and payment for the vehicles.
Typically, a participating vehicle owner may use the vehicle-sharing platform to i) describe their vehicle(s), such as the make and model, that are available for rent, ii) set a location for pickup and return of the vehicle(s), and iii) mark available days of the week that their vehicle(s) are available for rent. Participating renters may access the vehicle-sharing platform to search for a vehicle to rent according to their criteria, such as the time period they will need to drive the vehicle, the type of desired vehicle, price, etc. The success of such a vehicle-sharing platform often depends on a sense of trust between the participating vehicle owners and renters. To build trust, vehicle-sharing platforms typically require the participating vehicle owners and renters to verify their identities, such as by entering in their license number and credit card information. Vehicle-sharing platforms may also set general expectations that apply to all participating renters, such as a no smoking policy in the vehicle.
Despite the high-level trust mechanisms mentioned above that are already in place, conventional vehicle-sharing platforms lack low-level trust mechanisms. For example, recently proposed vehicle-sharing platforms are unable to generate and enforce personal preferences onto participating renters to allow only a subset of the participating renters to rent an owner's vehicle or, at best, allow only high-level filtering mechanisms (e.g., by only enabling owners to filter according to overall reviews/ratings that other owners have given to the renters in the past). In one scenario, although all verified participating renters have approved driving histories, participating vehicle owners may only trust participating renters that have a higher standard of driving etiquette. Existing vehicle-sharing platforms simply do not include a means for generating and enforcing these sorts of personal preferences onto participating renters. Such shortcomings have to date been inadequately addressed, if at all.